Kill Your Darlings

I spent last Sunday night staring out the window, watching the eastern sky shift pale and purple against the backdrop of glowing streetlights. Lying there in the deafening silence, paralyzed by the chasm between our still bodies, my own cowardice that brought me here in the first place, I wondered when it all started falling apart at the seams. The butterflies turned into maggots – the illusion dispersed in the early winter chill – the wave of suffocating unreality. 

You are asleep (or faking sleep) and I am watching the rise and fall of your uneven breathing. Sometime between the fleeting touches and speaking glances from last night, something had changed and maybe become irreparably broken. Then, it becomes a simple matter of learning how to deconstruct yourself, so that when you put the parts back together, you are practically unrecognizable. Yesterday I tried to drown myself in the lake. Because I can still feel the burn of your fingertips along the ridge of my hipbone running down to the space behind my knees. Because I cut those pieces out and buried the scars, so I could pretend to feel whole again.